Archive for June, 2013
ANOTHER CLASSIC NOVEL
Writer’s Digest once published a list of famous authors and the books they considered essential books in their lives. One book mentioned by a great deal of them was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The English translation was first published in 1970. In 1982, Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
I felt an obligation to obtain this novel and recently finished reading it. It is both a haunting and haunted story. The one problem I had was the names and remembering which character was which, but Marquez provides a genealogy chart to help in this matter. The problem was that many of the names are very similar, but that confusion, on my part, was a small price to pay. This was a most excellent read. It’s one of those stories that is a little difficult to get into but once you’re there, you’re sorry when you’re finished.
It essentially follows a family that establishes a town in the Caribbean. The exact location is never revealed nor is the date. The story is populated by some characters that live well over a hundred years and by a healthy amount of ghosts. The book is full of both sorrow and humor. One common theme for most of the characters is no matter how many family members or friends they have, they experience a feeling of solitude in their lives.
I highly recommend giving this book a try.
A FATHER’S DAY POEM
The members of my writers group, The Wordwrights, were given an assignment to write a Father’s Day piece. I decided to write a poem.
The poem is bleak, but it reflects a trend I see.
I could be totally wrong. I hope I am.
THE FATHER THAT NEVER WAS
Contributing their seed,
They flee,
Gone.
Not knowing life was passed,
Never hearing the first cry
In the silent night,
Creating a hollow being,
Guidance from the streets
Of despair,
Walking a path
Into a world
Of dead ends,
Death, all too young
The only future.
H.P. LOVECRAFT, A CLASSIC AUTHOR OF HORROR
All my life I loved to read horror. As a teenager, I chose my reading material by the cover of the paperback, the more gruesome the better. It was during this period of my life that I discovered H.P. Lovecraft. I loved the moodiness of his stories and the amphibian-like humans the inhabited some of his stories only added to my pleasure.
I am in the process of rereading some of his work. Barnes & Noble sells an excellent compilation of all Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas. For $20 you get over one thousand pages of horror. The style of some of the stories is rather dated, but for the most part enjoyable.
Just recently I finished reading his novella The Dunwich Horror. As the story progresses, you realize something is not quite right with one of the main characters. It is the conclusion of the story that I found most satisfying. For horror fans, this is an excellent read and serves to maintain the Lovecraft approach to the land of the fantastic.
A NEW APPRECIATION OF AN OLD STORY
For the last few months I’ve been doing a lot of reading and I’d like to share with you a book that I recently finished that I found to be a fantastic read.
I’ve been haunting the local Goodwill Store lately, picking up books and stumbled across a paperback written by Nikos Kazantzakis and first published in 1952. The title of the book was well-known to me but I had no idea of what the story involved. I should add that he is also the author of The Last Temptation of Christ. The title of the book I wish to discuss is his novel, Zorba the Greek.
Who has not heard of this book, yet again how many continue to read this work? If I hadn’t stumbled upon it I too would have remained ignorant of this fantastic story.
The story takes place in Crete. The two main characters are the narrator, whom I think is never named. He is bookish young man who comes to Crete with money, hoping to make more. He hires Zorba and together they start mining for coal.
The thrust of the book is the frequent talks about what life is about and the existence of God between a young man wrapped in words and not life and 65 year old Zorba who has experienced life to its fullest and is not ready to stop his search for love and his lust for life.
This is not meant to be a review but only to let you know that this is a most satisfying read and worth the trouble to seek out this book.
Michael Dirda, a book critic for the Washington Post, loves used book stores. He said in one of his books that you should try reading something written fifty years ago indicating that there are long forgotten treasures out there. I found one.
I RETURN
My consistent readers,
I return after a long hiatus, part due to a seaside vacation and part to a regrouping of my priorities in life and my writing.
As difficult, and at times depressing, writing may be I have decided to attack the projects I have begun with more vigor and determination. I know I am not alone in this mystic endeavor when I say that I went through a long period thinking that anything I wrote was worthless and thought ‘who would read this shit’.
Those ghosts of despair are still lingering, but for better or for worse – I’m back.
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